For the past 25 years I’ve been conducting Mathematica seminars and teaching students how to develop applications using the program in a wide variety of campuses. These experiences have taught me several things:

i. A majority of both experienced users and newcomers, still think erroneously that Mathematica is mostly a language for solving symbolic math problems.

ii. Plenty of long-term users are not aware of many of the new capabilities that that have been added to the program over the years.

iii. The number of functions available has grown enormously and now there are more than 6,000. With so many functions, it very time consuming to learn about them using the extensive Wolfram documentation.

In this book, I have decided to address these issues and show that the program has capabilities that go beyond math calculations (that’s the reason behind the book title). Throughout the text, Mathematica’s features, including of course the latest ones, are introduced while solving problems in many different fields such as: astronomy, biology, chemistry, economics, finance, geography, linguistics and nuclear physics among many others (See Contents) . When choosing the problems, I have relied on my own experience and also modified a few selected examples from Wolfram Research vast information resources. At the end of each chapter there’re also additional sources to further explore the topics. I have also strived to avoid writing too complicated programs and except in a reduced number of cases, all the examples contain just a few lines of code.

Basically, this is the book that I wish I had had when I started learning Mathematica. A book that without the help of my colleague Ruben Garcia Berasategui would not have been possible to publish in English.

The entire text, including the table of contents and index, have been written exclusively using Mathematica (edited in Math 11.0, tested with Math 11.1, 11.2 and 11.3). Since the book not only aims at introducing the reader to Mathematica but also to the technical and scientific fields covered, it could be read without being in front a computer. However, to be able to take full advantage of it, access to a local or cloud version of the software is required.

If you have some comment about the book send to me an e-mail (guillermo2046(at)gmail.com, with Subject: Mathematica beyond)

Summary

Although many books have been written about Mathematica, very few of them cover the new functionality added to the most recent versions of the program including its natural language capabilities, curated datasets and entities. This text introduces the new features using real-world examples, based on the experience of the author as a consultant. In the process, you will also learn more about the Wolfram Language and how you can use it to solve a wide variety of problems. Both are the most important objectives of the book. To accomplish that, the author raises questions from a wide range of topics and answers them by taking full advantage of Mathematica’s latest features. Examples that strike a balance between relevance and difficulty in terms of Mathematica syntax allowing readers to incrementally build up their Mathematica skills as they go through the chapters.

The book shows how a newcomers can start to use the language without knowing any function (using the natural language). However some knowledge is recommended, even advanced users can find useful the examples used . When the book is finished, the user will know about 1000 functions, and the most important: the user will have learnt how to browse to find an appropriate function.

Click here (Updated 2018-03-17) to download the supplementary materials where it is included some files to replicate a few examples described in the books and Comments and Corrections.